And now, if that be true, what follows?  Surely this, that for all you who have, in any measure, caught a glimpse of what you ought to be, and have been more or less vainly trying to realise your ideal, and reach your goal, there is a better way than the way of self-centred and self-derived and self-dependent effort.  There is the way of opening your hearts and spirits to the entrance and access of that great power, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, which will do in us and for us all that we know we ought to do, and yet feel hampered and hindered in performing.

Oh, dear friends! there are many of you, I believe, who have more or less spasmodically and interruptedly, but with a continual recurrence to the effort, sought to plant your feet firmly in the paths of righteousness, and have more or less failed.  Listen to this Gospel, and accept it, and put it to the proof.  The love of God which is in Christ Jesus, and the life which that love brings in its hands, for all of us who will trust it, will dwell in you if you will, and mould you into His own likeness, and the law of the spirit of life which was in Christ Jesus will make us free from the law of sin and death.

All noble living is a battle.  Can you and I, with our ten thousand, meet him that cometh against us with his twenty, the temptations of the world and of its Prince?  Send for the reinforcements, and Jesus Christ will come and teach your hands to war and your fingers to fight.  All noble life is self-denial, coercion, restraint; and can my poor, feeble hands apply muscular force enough to the brake to keep the wheels clogged, and prevent them from whirling me downhill into ruin?  Let Him come and put His great gentle hand on the top of yours, and that will enable you to scotch the wheels, and make self-denial possible.  All noble life is a building up by slow degrees from the foundation.  And can you and I complete the task with our own limited resources, and our own feeble strengths?  Will not ’all that pass by begin to mock’ us and say, ’This man began to build and was not able to finish’?  That is the epitaph written over all moralities and over all lives which, catching some glimpse of the good and the true and the noble, have tried, apart from Christ, to reproduce them in themselves.  Frightful gaps, and an unfinished, however fair structure end them all.  Go to Him.  ’His hand hath laid the foundation of the house, His hand shall also finish it.’  He who is Himself the foundation-stone is also the headstone of the corner, which is brought forth with shouting of ‘Grace!  Grace unto it!’